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Monday, October 31, 2011

Since the Cold War the United States has fought three major wars. Congress authorized each of these wars. The president has also initiated several limited wars. These limited wars have not been explicitly approved by Congress as required by Article I of the Constitution. A review of the history of making limited wars suggests several conclusions. First, the president has assumed a de facto power to begin and pursue a limited war, understood as a struggle where no American combat deaths are expected. Second, Congress has at times been highly critical of such wars but also highly deferential to the president in cases where the wars were brief and popular. Third, an active and critical Congress can shape the president's choices and decisions about such wars. Fourth, the public is often skeptical about limited wars and strongly supports congressional approval of such undertakings. Finally, until recently, presumed presidential authority under the Constitution was more important than the approval of international institutions in legitimating limited wars. In Libya the approval of the United Nations Security Council and other international institutions was essential to legitimating the war according the Obama administration. This incremental transfer of the war powers to international institutions contravenes the republican nature of the United States Constitution.

NEW YORK -- The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted Monday to admit Palestine into the organization as its newest member, and the United States promptly responded by cutting off funding for the agency.

Acting under a legal requirement to cut U.S. funds to any U.N. agency that recognizes a Palestinian state, the State Department on Monday announced that the United States has stopped funding UNESCO because of the vote. Department spokesman Victoria Nuland told reporters that the Obama administration would not make a planned $60 million payment to the agency due in November.

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Sadly, Herman Cain’s predictions have come true. In May he stated that he was "ready for the same high-tech lynching that [Clarence Thomas] went through -- for the good of this country." That's what Politico is doing with its unsubstantiated and thoroughly hypocritical hit piece against him. Anyone in the press that gives this story oxygen is equally hypocritical.

In the eyes of the liberal media, Herman Cain is just another uppity black American who has had the audacity to leave the liberal plantation. So they must destroy him, just as they tried destroying Clarence Thomas.

The richest irony here is that the same media that refused to cover evidence of an alleged rape by a state Attorney General who became President now are running stories based on unnamed sources, about offenses that aren’t a fraction as grave. But one was a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican -- hence the double standard.

Consider the source: Ken Vogel of Politico used to work for the George Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity in Washington and has been involved in numerous attacks on conservatives. There is no hiding a liberal agenda when considering Ken Vogel’s work, and this latest smear attempt on Cain is further proof. “The liberal media need to wake up and deal with the fact that successful, black Americans can be conservative. They are going insane realizing he might one day be President, too."

Editor's Note: For full disclosure, Herman Cain is both the former National Chairman for the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute, and a personal friend of Mr. Bozell.

Michelle’s back, and she’s madder than ever. She was already pretty angry, seemingly unhappy with just about everything. As her husband wrapped up the Democratic nomination in 2008, she let fly her real feelings: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” A few months into her job as first lady, her French counterpart asked how she liked the gig: “Don’t ask!” she reportedly spat. “It’s hell. I can’t stand it!”

She even seems to be mad at her silver-tongued husband. When the two were to set off on a luxurious 10-day vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, she left early - four hours early - and flew up alone. And those private vacations. She’s traveled to some of the world’s most plush resorts, taking 42 days off in the past year - that’d be eight weeks of vacay time if she held down a normal job.

Now, she is ready to spew her bilious disgust with America on the campaign trail. A dignified, transcendent first lady? No chance. Michelle is going to break with a hundred years of tradition and play the role of attack dog, heaping derision on her husband’s political opponents like no other first lady before her.

And it’s already begun. Mad Michelle this week popped down to Davis Island, Fla., to hobnob with the very people her husband despises - the 1 percent. At a massive mansion on the bay, filled with the wealthiest of the wealthy, America’s first lady launched into a tirade about “them” - the Republicans.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

"We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house."

House Speaker John Boehner said something quite significant last week during an interview with Talk Radio Network's Laura Ingraham. Speaking of President Obama's vow to take unilateral executive actions because, in the chief executive's words, "we can't wait for Congress to do their job," Boehner offered this observation: "We are keeping a very close eye on the administration to make sure they are following the law and following the Constitution. We have the ability to limit their use of funds to try to bring this administration to heel."

Boehner is right, Congress can indeed limit what presidents can do simply by denying them the funds or by limiting how those funds can be spent. As political scientists Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey wrote in their "Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition," Congress "has all the ultimate weapons in any showdown with either of the other two branches" of the federal government. But the question for the House speaker is why are we just now hearing him issue this warning to Obama nearly a year after voters restored Boehner's party to majority status in the people's house? The Republican victory of 2010 represented a historically deep rejection of Obama's programs. Not only did voters put a GOP majority in control of the House, they also elected legions of new Republican governors and state legislators in the most massive off-year victory for the party since before the Great Depression.

Friday, October 28, 2011

"Today, America’s culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt: don’t look, don’t judge, don’t be certain."

American voters have fired two modern presidents after just one term, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both suffered because the economy was in poor shape, and both faced disaffection within their own parties. But there was another thing those candidates had in common: They both faced relatively strong third-party candidates in the November election.

John B. Anderson in 1980 and H. Ross Perot in 1992 both ran as independent centrists, and while they weren't the only reason the incumbents lost (Ronald Reagan won a majority of the popular vote in 1980), they were certainly a factor.

Until now, handicapping for next year's presidential election has focused on how President Obama might fare in a two-candidate race. Could Obama beat Mitt Romney? Rick Perry? Herman Cain? (In all three cases, the answer is probably yes.)

But there's likely to also be a wild card in this election. Americans Elect, a well-funded "virtual third party," plans to put a centrist presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, and while he or she is unlikely to win the presidential election, the presence of a third candidate could still have a major impact on the outcome.

The large Republican presidential field, along with the dramatic surges and collapses of several of its candidates, may ultimately be much ado about nothing. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Republican strategists surveyed in this week's National Journal Political Insiders Poll, who almost unanimously identified Mitt Romney as the most likely candidate to win the nomination. In the five times the GOP Insiders have been asked that question in 2011, Romney has never surrendered the top spot.

Rank the top five candidates, 1 through 5, in terms of who you think is most likely to capture the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.Republicans(105 votes)CANDIDATE INSIDERS INDEX SCORE*Mitt Romney 98Rick Perry 72Herman Cain 47Newt Gingrich 31Rick Santorum 13Jon Huntsman 11Michele Bachmann 7Ron Paul 5*Methodology: In tallying the rankings, a first-place vote was worth 5 points, a second-place vote was worth 4 points, and so on. The Insiders Index reflects the percentage of points that each contender received out of the maximum possible. For example, Mitt Romney scored an Index rating of 98, meaning he received 98 percent of the possible 525 points, the number he would have if all 105 participants in the poll this week had ranked him first.

From Hurricane Irene, which soaked the entire East Coast in August, to the Midwest tornadoes, which wrought havoc from Wisconsin to Texas, 2011 has seen more billion-dollar natural disasters than any year on record, according to the National Climatic Data Center. And as America’s hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and wildfires set records this year, so too has President Obama in his response to them.

During the first 10 months of this year President Obama declared 89 major disasters, more than the record 81 declarations that he made in all of 2010.
And Obama has declared more disasters — 229 — in the first three years of his presidency than almost any other president signed in their full four-year terms. Only President George W. Bush declared more, having signed 238 disaster declarations in his second term, from 2005 to 2009.
But while the sheer number of bad weather events played a big role in the uptick in presidential disaster declarations, Obama’s record-setting year may have something to do with politics as well.

“There’s no question about it that the increase in the number of disaster declarations is outstripping what we would expect to see, given what we observe in terms of weather,” said Robert Hartwig, the president and economist at the Insurance Information Institute. “There’s a lot of political pressure on the president and Congress to show they are responsive to these sorts of disasters that occur.”

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Sam Roberts, who also hosts the New York Times’s weekly political podcast “The Caucus,” had a left-wing take on a study on income disparity in Wednesday’s edition suggesting it justified the left-wing Occupy Wall Street Protest: “As the Data Show, There’s a Reason the Protesters Chose New York.” Included was a graphic on “The New Gilded Age,” with an income disparity chart sourced from the left-leaning Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

Reporter Robert Pear also bought into class warfare in Wednesday’s paper: “It’s Official: The Rich Get Richer,” keyed to a Congressional Budget Office report showing “The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades.” Alongside was a photo of a protester sympathizing with the Occupy Wall Street sit-in by holding an “I Am 99%” sign, with a photo caption concluding hopefully: “A new report may spur the protests.”

Republicans in the U.S. Congress are calling for $2.2 trillion in deficit-reduction cuts, including significant cuts to healthcare programs for the elderly and poor, along with tax changes that they argue would boost the economy, congressional aides said.

The plan offered by Republicans, who serve on a congressional "super committee" tasked with slashing deficits , calls for cuts to the Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the poor and elderly and other health and welfare programs.

In contrast to a Democratic plan that has an almost even balance between spending cuts and tax increases, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner told reporters the focus should be almost exclusively on cutting benefit programs. He also rejected the idea of additional defense spending cuts.

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced.

Euro zone leaders intend to scale up their emergency fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to around 1.0 trillion euros, EU sources said on Wednesday.

The sources said the 440 billion euros ($611.4 billion) fund, set up last year, would have about 250-275 billion euros available after amounts are set aside for aid to Greece, Ireland and Portugal and for the recapitalizing the region's banks.

That amount would be scaled up around four times, arriving at a headline figure of around 1.0 trillion.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Among the enumerated powers in our Constitution, there is no federal jurisdiction over the purchases you make at your local stores, aside from those involving interstate transactions. Unfortunately, statists throughout our history have tried and succeeded at expanding the federal government’s power over you in this regard. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court regrettably ruled that, under the Commerce Clause, an Ohio farmer named Roscoe Filburn needed federal permission to feed his own wheat to his own cows, neither of which left his own farm, let alone crossed state lines.

Conservative resistance to Republican Mitt Romney appears to be giving way as a top rival indicated he would endorse the former Bay State governor if he wins the GOP nod — and others on the right embraced the idea he would mount the strongest challenge to President Obama.

On the issue of public debt, Washington is experiencing what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” The financial news is so relentlessly terrible that people have become numb to it and assume nothing can be done to regain control over our fate.

Today the world’s public and private debt exceeds an incredible 300 percent of GDP. We are at risk of succumbing to an ugly, downward, global mark-to-market in asset prices. Yet the discussion in Washington fails to reflect the immensity of the threat.

When Pres. Barack Obama took the podium last Friday to abruptly announce the imminent end of the Iraq War, he ended on a ringing McGovernite note: “After a decade of war, the nation that we need to build — and the nation that we will build — is our own.”

Come home, America: Deficit spending, solar subsidies, and a millionaire’s tax are beckoning you. Come home, America: To the comforts of an infrastructure bank and yet more aid to states and localities. Come home, America: To the challenge of fighting tax breaks for Big Oil and corporate jets, and malign corporate influence wherever it is found.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers

I like the overall approach of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan. As I recently wrote, it focuses on lower tax rates, elimination of double taxation, and repeal of corrupt and inefficient loopholes.

But I included a very important caveat. The intermediate stage of his three-step plan would enable politicians to impose both an income tax and a national sales tax. I wrote in my earlier post that I had faith in Herman Cain’s motives, but I was extremely uncomfortable with the idea of letting the crowd in Washington have an extra source of revenue.

After all, Europe’s welfare states began their march to fiscal collapse and economic stagnation after they added a version of a national sales tax on top of their pre-existing income taxes.

But it seems that I was too nice in my analysis of Mr. Cain’s plan. Josh Barro and Bruce Bartlett are both claiming that the business portion of Cain’s 9-9-9 is a value-added tax (VAT) rather than a corporate income tax.

Let’s elaborate. The business portion of Cain’s plan apparently does not allow employers to deduct wages and salaries, which means — for all intents and purposes — that they would levy a 9 percent withholding tax on employee compensation. And that would be in addition to the 9 percent they presumably would withhold for the flat tax portion of Cain’s plan.

Employers use withholding in the current system, of course, but at least taxpayers are given credit for all that withheld tax when filling out their 1040 tax forms. Under Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, however, employees would only get credit for monies withheld for the flat tax.

In other words, there are two income taxes in Cain’s plan — the 9 percent flat tax and the hidden 9 percent income tax that is part of the VAT (this hidden income tax on wages and salaries, by the way, is a defining feature of a VAT).

This doesn’t make Cain’s plan bad from a theoretical perspective. The underlying principles are still sound — low tax rates, no double taxation, and no loopholes.

But if I was uneasy when I thought that the 9-9-9 plan added a sales tax on top of the income tax, then I am super-duper-double-secret-probation uneasy about adding a sales tax and a VAT on top of the income tax.

Here’s my video on the VAT, which will help you realize why this pernicious tax would be a big mistake.

Again, this doesn’t make Cain wrong if we’re grading based on economics or philosophy. My anxiety is a matter of real-world political analysis. I don’t trust politicians with new sources of revenue. Whether we give them big new sources of revenue or small new sources of revenue, they will always figure out ways of pushing up the tax rates so they can waste more money trying to buy votes.

More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

The results suggest that Americans don’t view the country’s current economic and political troubles as temporary, but instead see them continuing for many years.

A notable moment on Morning Joe today, as Joe Scarborough called out Mika Brzezinski on her double standard when it comes to criticizing politicians for their over-the-top remarks.

Setting Scarborough off was Brzezinski's defense of Joe Biden's allegation that crime, including rape, would increase if Republicans don't vote for President Obama's latest tax-raising stimulus plan. Joe claimed Mika would surely condemn a Republican, such as Michelle Bachmann, employing similar fear-mongering tactics.

"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

~ George Mason, (1725-1792), drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights

The nightmare on Main Street -- the federal income tax code -- is ending, which is fantastic news for our beleaguered economy. Dramatically simplifying this monstrosity would unleash a powerful wave of prosperity and job creation.Thankfully in 2012 we will get a mandate to make this happen. Presidential contender Herman Cain vaulted to the head of the Republican pack when he proposed his 9-9-9 plan -- a flat 9% income tax, corporate tax and national sales tax. Even better, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will, in a few days, unveil his version of a flat tax, a concept that I have long advocated.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

Among the most frequently heard criticisms from Democrats of President George W. Bush and the pre-2006 Republican majorities in the House and Senate was that corporations were being coddled even as they were sending American jobs overseas. Then President Obama proposed his $787 billion economic stimulus program and promised that it would bring unemployment down to 8 percent or less while saving or creating up to 3. 5 million jobs. It's nearly three years later, the official unemployment rate is still above 9 percent (and could be double that when those who quit looking for work or are underemployed are counted), and the media is increasingly full of headlines on stories about hundreds of millions of tax dollars being wasted in stimulus program scandals, most notably the $537 million Solyndra bankruptcy.

Liberal lawmakers will soon send the congressional deficit panel the details of a Pentagon report that shows defense firms over the last decade ripped off the military to the tune of $1.1 trillion, Democratic sources told The Hill.

Pro-military lawmakers from both parties have warned the supercommittee to avoid Pentagon spending cuts beyond the $350 billion ordered by the August debt deal.

But several Senate Democrats want the panel to keep in mind that dollars sent to the Pentagon are often lost to fraud and waste, even as some conservatives raise the possibility of retroactively exempting the Pentagon from the $600 billion cut that will be triggered if the supercommittee fails.

Friday, October 21, 2011

ABC's Brian Ross on Friday investigated a $500 million government loan to a car company that is now operating in Finland. Ross highlighted how Vice President Joe Biden in 2009 claimed this would create jobs in America. Yet, the Good Morning America reporter left out a key component for the network version of the story: Fisker, the European car company involved, have ties to big Obama campaign bundlers.

Ross began the segment by explaining to viewers: "[Henrik] Fisker got a federal loan two years ago of more than $500 million, with Vice President Joseph Biden saying the company would employ auto workers in his home state, Delaware." Yet, the 500 jobs created are in Finland, not the United States. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Occupy Wall Street is a carnival. Both detractors and supporters say so. The most amusing part of the show is watching the rush to join it. When Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman endorse the cause, you have to wonder about its revolutionary bona fides. Democrats have also flung themselves in the direction of Zuccotti Park—but in their pursuit of the movement they may damage themselves and hinder the protests’ potential to do tangible good.

PRINCETON, NJ -- President Barack Obama's 11th quarter in office was the worst of his administration, based on his quarterly average job approval ratings. His 41% approval average is down six percentage points from his 10th quarter in office, and is nearly four points below his previous low of 45% during his seventh quarter.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) abruptly cancelled a planned economic address Friday at the University of Pennsylvania after learning that the event could be flooded with protesters aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Cantor was to deliver a speech titled, “A Fair Shot at the American Dream and Economic Growth” at the university’s elite Wharton School of Business, but the school announced the event was off about three-and-a-half hours before Cantor’s scheduled 4:30 p.m. speech.

"The Office of the Majority Leader was informed last night by Capitol Police that the University of Pennsylvania was unable to ensure that the attendance policy previously agreed to could be met,” Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon told The Hill.

Comment: Once again it appears that the free speech protections of the 1st Amendment applies only to liberals and OWS protestors!

Thursday, October 20, 2011

CNN's Piers Morgan claimed on Wednesday that "elements" of the Tea Party are "racist" in an interview with GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. "You all know there are elements of the Tea Party who are racist," he insisted to Cain.

Morgan again stated it as a matter of fact, in his question to Cain: "How do you deal with that element in the Tea Party that is overtly racist?"

The CNN host also cited black liberals Harry Belafonte and Morgan Freeman as bona-fide experts about the matter, and pressed Cain to respond to them and other "leading black Americans" who think the movement is racist.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., announced his retirement from Congress this afternoon -- and he issued a scathing parting shot at President Obama's track record on his way out.

In a statement explaining his decision, Cardoza, a leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, said he was "dismayed" by the administration's "failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure

If the President's proposed 5.6% surplus tax was levied on all the income over $1 Million it would only produce an extra $27 Billion of taxes. Every time Washington sneezes it spends $27 Billion (Over $3 Trillion every year)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday indicated Congress needs to worry about government jobs more than private-sector jobs, and that this is why Senate Democrats are pushing a bill aimed at shoring up teachers and first-responders.

"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about," Reid said on the Senate floor.

Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.

Bottom line: The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009. That means less money to spend at the spa or the movies, less for vacations, new carpeting for the house, or dinner at a restaurant.

In short, it means a less vibrant economy, with more Americans spending primarily on necessities. The diminished standard of living, moreover, is squeezing the middle class, whose restlessness and discontent are evident in grass-roots movements such as the tea party and "Occupy Wall Street" and who may take out their frustrations on incumbent politicians in next year's election.

What has led to the most dramatic drop in the US standard of living since at least 1960? One factor is stagnant incomes: Real median income is down 9.8 percent since the start of the recession through this June, according to Sentier Research in Annapolis, Md., citing census bureau data. Another is falling net worth – think about the value of your home and, if you have one, your retirement portfolio. A third is rising consumer prices, with inflation eroding people's buying power by 3.25 percent since mid-2008.

"In a dynamic economy, one would expect Americans' disposable income to be growing, but it has flattened out at a low level," says economist Bob Brusca of Fact & Opinion Economics in New York.

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

In an interview that will be aired tonight on ABC News, President Obama continues to express his commitment to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama tells ABC News. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

The president also compares the protesters to the Tea Party. “In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party," Obama says. "Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.”

Maybe it's time for Obama to be on the side of hard working Americans instead of whining freeloaders!

President Obama is against repealing the health law's long-term-care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government's announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.

"We do not support repeal," the official said Monday. "Repealing the CLASS Act isn't necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country."

Proposal would require employers to use E-verify; Attorney General to maintain database

FRANKFORT, Ky. (October 18, 2011) – Rep. Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville (58th District) announced today he is prefiling legislation for the 2012 Regular Legislative Session that if passed would require all employers who either have contracts with public agencies, or those with 11 or more employees to use E-verify for the purpose of cutting down on the number of illegal aliens seeking work in Kentucky.

“Persons who are residing in Kentucky illegally need to be put on notice that the Commonwealth will no longer turn a blind eye to them breaking the law,” said Rep. Montell. “By requiring businesses to do a simple identification check before hiring, we can insure our communities are safer from individuals who chose to come here illegally, as well as preserving our well paying jobs for our citizens.”

Under Rep. Montell’s proposal, any employer who has a contract or contracts with public agencies to register and use E-verify, and also stipulates that if a contractors hires an unauthorized alien during the contract period that the company would lose that work and be banned from doing work with public agencies for one year for a first offense, and five years for a second offense. It would also require the Attorney General to report the offending company to the Office of Homeland Security and maintain a data base of banned contractors.

In addition Rep. Montell’s bill requires any company with 11 or more employees to register and use E-verify by January 1, 2013. Any firm failing to use E-verify or found guilty violating Federal laws prohibiting the hiring of illegal aliens would not be eligible for state tax incentives or credits, reimbursement of taxes and other fees, including those due on financial incentives or tax credits, and UI benefits, and could have their state license denied or suspended.

This proposal would also require the Attorney General’s office to maintain a data base of Kentucky companies using E-verify, which would be updated every 90 days by the Office of Homeland Security. Any company who hires an illegal alien could be subject to a variety of penalties, including suspension of their business license for up to one year.

80% of those polled said that the rich should pay higher taxes and that it’s fair that approximately the top 10% of tax payers pay more than 70% of the taxes in the US and about 40% of employed people pay no income tax.
93% say that student loan debt should be forgiven
98% believe that health care should be free
98% believe that Insurance companies make too much money and some of their profits should be taken to pay for more healthcare for others
95% believe that drug prices should be controlled
93% believe that communications like cell phone and internet access be a right and not just reserved for the rich and we should have free internet and cell phone service as a national goal.
84% said they think that if a bank decides to implement a $5 debit card fee, the government should not allow it, while 16% said let them do what they want – customers can move.
70% of those responding see this ending in a dramatic fashion, like Greece.

Oh goody.

Do you see the pattern? They want free stuff paid for by other people. What a perfect example of the greed they complain so bitterly about.

When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending, and in April they succeeded in getting a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011's budget. Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut another $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

Some analysts have blamed these spending cuts for this year's economic slowdown.

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there hasn't been any spending cuts at all.

In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That's an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher.

Whether Herman Cain’s surge in the polls is temporary or has staying power, he’s enjoying a big enough bounce to take a very slight lead over President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 matchup. At the moment, the Georgia businessman is the only Republican with a lead of any kind over Obama, although former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has held a similar advantage several times and is currently trailing the president by just two points.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters shows Cain attracting 43% support, while Obama earns 41%. Given such a matchup, eight percent (8%) prefer some other candidate, and another eight percent (8%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Sunday, October 16, 2011

What Do You Call a Jobs Bill That Begets No Jobs?: Caroline Baum
By Caroline Baum
October 13, 2011 8:00 PM EDT
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When President Barack Obama “pivoted” to jobs a few months back (from what, the White House didn’t say), he said he was going to take his plan to rebuild the U.S. economy directly to the American people.
It’s a good thing, too, because Congress isn’t interested. Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act of 2011 was never going to see the light of day in the Republican-controlled House. The Senate gave it the thumbs-down this week, voting 50-49 to block the bill, well shy of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. Even some of the Democrats who voted to bring the bill to the floor said they would have voted no on the bill itself.
That doesn’t mean it’s dead. Obama has vowed to continue pushing his jobs package, with its temporary tax cuts and hiring incentives for small business, extended unemployment benefits and money for public works projects. The Senate now plans to take up selected provisions of the bill.
We can only hope they pick and choose wisely. Some measures, such as the “bridge to work” program, seem reasonable. People receiving unemployment benefits could spend up to eight weeks as unpaid trainees working for eligible employers, learning new skills and enhancing their job prospects.
But the bill includes a lot of short-term incentives that wouldn’t encourage hiring, anti-discrimination protections for unemployed workers that wouldn’t get them rehired, trade restrictions that would raise the cost of infrastructure projects, and a decade of new taxes to pay for all the new spending.
Significant Shortcomings
As for the president’s contention that his bill is “fully paid for,” with the spending front-loaded and the tax increases deferred until after 2013, it sure sounds like another case of government betting on the come.
What do you call a jobs bill that professes to create jobs when in fact it wouldn’t have much of a real-world effect? Here are some adjectives that come to mind.
1. Naive
It’s naive to think that small business would take advantage of a one-time $4,000 tax credit to hire an employee at a salary of, say, $30,000 a year, not including training or benefits, said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small and independent businesses.
What’s more, businesses would assume the risk up front and receive the benefit (the tax credit) a year later.
Like many of the tax incentives enacted over the past few years, those proposed in the jobs bill are set on such short time frames as to negate their effect, Rys said.
2. Misinformed
The president proposed spending $80 billion to put tens of thousands of residential construction workers, casualties of the housing bust, back to work rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges and schools. But that’s unlikely, according to NFIB chief economist Bill Dunkelberg.
“The skill sets aren’t well matched; government programs generally require union workers, so most small construction firms won’t qualify; and home builders don’t have the equipment for roads and bridges,” Dunkelberg said.
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, great idea.
3. Short-sighted
Many Democrats, including Obama, define stimulus as “putting money in the pockets of those who will spend it.” How, then, does the president justify taking money out of those same pockets?
Section 4 of the jobs bill, titled “Buy American,” would do just that. It specifies that government funds would be available only to infrastructure projects that use manufactured goods (iron and steel, for example) produced in the U.S. It doesn’t specify that such a provision would raise the cost of those projects.
Every legislative proviso has exceptions. In the case of “Buy American,” the rules wouldn’t apply if complying was “not in the public interest” (who decides?); if there was an insufficient amount of American-produced iron and steel available (who’s counting?); or if it would “increase the cost of the project by more than 25 percent” (23 percent is OK?). One can only imagine the time and opportunity cost for small business to stay abreast of the relevant provisions.
4. Targeted
Obama wants to protect the unemployed from discrimination in the workplace. A noble goal, to be sure, but his bill would have the opposite effect by making it illegal to use a candidate’s employment status as a qualification for work.
How would the crafters of the jobs bill expect a reasonable businessman to behave when confronted with the prospect of a discrimination suit for failing to hire an unemployed applicant? He wouldn’t even grant that candidate an interview, according to Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot Inc.
Look at the bright side: This provision is certain to provide enough billable hours for law firms to justify hiring new lawyers.
5. Insane
Obama has vowed to forge ahead with his jobs plan, fulfilling that well-known definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In February 2009, Congress enacted the $825 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Since then, the U.S. economy has lost an additional 1.5 million workers.
The Obama administration can argue that the stimulus “created or saved” 3.5 million jobs, and that the economy would have been in worse shape without it, but those assertions can’t be tested or proved. Only in model-land can econometricians pinpoint outcomes to the nearest 10th of a percentage point.
If the stimulus had been successful, Obama wouldn’t be hawking version 2.0, with many of the same short-term incentives that didn’t fool those it was designed to help.
That means we have to rely on Congress, not a reliable source of salvation, to nix the anti-job measures in the jobs- wanting bill.
(Caroline Baum, author of “Just What I Said,” is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Caroline Baum in New York at cabaum@bloomberg.net.

President Obama is returning to the road this week to press Congress to start passing the American Jobs Act, beginning with $35 billion for states to put teachers and first-responders to work.

But White House officials said Sunday that Obama will not be sending a separate piece of legislation to Congress, referring questions about the process to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that Congress has a jump-start in producing legislative language because Obama submitted the American Jobs Act with the provisions contained within.

Obama will implement the full-court press on the pieces of the jobs act as he embarks on another bus tour, this time hitting the critical battleground states of North Carolina and Virginia, two states Obama won in 2008 that are essential to his reelection strategy.

October 16 2011 12:04 AM GMT
Violence in Rome as protests go global
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By Guy Dinmore in Rome
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Rome sees its worst unrest for decades, as one of the largest global protests against the financial system turns violent

Read the full article at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c0f54f7c-f735-11e0-9941-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss

Just how far are the media willing to go to get Barack Obama reelected?

As conservative author Ann Coulter told Fox News's Sean Hannity Friday evening, "He will have the entire mainstream media bucking for him and they will lie about the economy. 'Oh, it's a turnaround, don't stop him now'"

President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.

The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.

And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.

Many Democrats consider Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, the greatest threat to Obama when it comes to wooing centrist independents next year, and Romney this week has begun to present himself as a champion of middle-income Americans.

Obama aides point to recent surveys that show anger at Wall Street spanning ideologies, including a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which 68 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans say they have unfavorable impressions of the big financial institutions.

But the strategy of channeling anti-Wall Street anger carries risks. Many of Obama’s senior advisers have ties to the financial industry — a point that makes Occupy protesters wary of the president and his party.

In recent days, Obama has ramped up his rhetoric. He took the unusual step of targeting an individual company when he attacked Bank of America for its new $5 monthly debit-card fee, calling it “exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.” And his campaign and the White House have distributed messages blasting GOP candidates and lawmakers for wanting to repeal Wall Street regulations pushed by Obama and opposing the confirmation of a leader for the consumer protection bureau created as part of the overhaul.

“We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said in an interview. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it.”

“I’m pretty confident 12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’ ” Plouffe added.

GOP stance

Romney, no doubt anticipating the White House’s new attack line, sought to show solidarity with the demonstrators during this week’s GOP candidates debate.

“The reason you’re seeing protests . . . is middle-income Americans are having a hard time making ends meet,” he said.

GOP leaders say the Wall Street law is government overreach, and Romney’s economic plan calls for replacing it with a “streamlined regulatory framework.”

Obama has tried this line of attack before, railing in 2009 against “fat-cat bankers” who he accused of taking excessive bonuses in the wake of the financial meltdown. But after complaints from Democrats on Wall Street and business leaders, the president has spent much of the past year courting companies — even hiring a new chief of staff, William Daley, from the banking industry.

And many on the left have attacked Obama and his administration for its ties to Wall Street, arguing that the financial regulatory overhaul fell far short of an industry makeover that many critics believed necessary.

Much of his top economic team has roots in the financial services industry, and in recent months Daley and top campaign aides have devoted much of their time improving the relationship with big-dollar donors on Wall Street.

That relationship helps explain the brewing tensions between Democratic officials and the Occupy Wall Street protests. The growing movement is adding new energy to a disaffected left that the party has been trying to excite — but it is largely separate from traditional party institutions.

“The fact that Obama has been so close to Wall Street makes this tough going for him,” said Van Jones, a longtime liberal organizer and former Obama aide.

Tea party echoes

The situation mirrors the choice Republican Party officials confronted in 2009 as the tea party movement found its footing and began challenging establishment figures in the GOP hierarchy. Over time, a series of establishment groups such as Freedom Works began coordinating with the activists, and the tea party insurgency began to more closely resemble the energized GOP base.

Liberal activists, though, see the Occupy groups as a potentially more unwieldy phenomenon resistant to traditional politics and resentful of the Democratic Party’s reliance on corporate money.

That distrust was evident at an Atlanta demonstration last week, when Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a legendary protester in his own right, was denied the chance to speak. A video of the incident, in which Lewis looks on uncomfortably as activists rise to debate whether allowing a congressman to speak violates the spirit of the protest, became an Internet sensation.

Other disputes have been raging online and in person at demonstration sites across the country. At Occupy D.C., the McPherson Square encampment inspired by Occupy Wall Street, a shouting match erupted this week when a woman describing herself as a longtime Democratic campaign worker encouraged the young protesters to express their concerns by voting, only to be told that voting was not enough.

An Obama strategist from Florida, Steve Schale, posted on his Facebook page that “clamoring for change is hollow unless you vote.” He linked to an image from the liberal Think Progress blog calling on activists to “Occupy the Polls.”

A former Obama volunteer from central Florida, Madison Paige, retorted on Schale’s page that voting alone could not fix the system, saying, “We have to be willing to do the hardest work — and that means taking a look in the mirror when necessary.”

How demonstrators channel their activism could depend on what they see and hear from Obama in the coming months — meaning the protests present opportunities and perils for the president as he starts to strike a more populist tone on the campaign trail.

“It’s not a danger — if [Obama] handles it properly,” said Steve Hildebrand, an architect of Obama’s 2008 grass-roots organization who is not affiliated with the reelection effort. “I would encourage him to carefully listen to the people who are passionately protesting Wall Street, big corporations and CEO pay.”

Obama and his aides have been cautious in discussing the demonstrations. The president said last week that the protesters were “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

But Obama also defended his support for bailing out distressed banks after the 2008 financial crisis, saying he “used up a lot of political capital, and I’ve got the dings and bruises to prove it, in order to make sure that we prevented a financial meltdown and that banks stayed afloat.”

Obama and his campaign are now ramping up efforts to portray the Wall Street overhaul he signed last year as a key rallying point. A campaign e-mail sent last week — as the demonstrations gained momentum — urged supporters to pressure the Senate to confirm former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created as part of the law.

“The goal of this campaign — and this President — is to make sure people who work hard and play by the rules get a fair shake, whether that means being able to get a loan to buy a house and send your kid to college, or not having to go bankrupt when you get sick,” the e-mail said.

Polls suggest that pressing such issues and going after the banks could be a winner, both with liberals and centrists. But it could also become uncomfortable next year — particularly if Obama continues to single out institutions such as Bank of America.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani told Sean Hannity on his talk show yesterday that, if he was still mayor, he would have told the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters, “You are not allowed to sleep on the streets.”

On his show, Hannity asked Giuliani how he would have dealt with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement if he was still mayor of New York City - to which Giuliani replied, “Well I had a rule and I enforced it as best I could and pretty effectively. The rule was: You’re not allowed to sleep on the streets. Sorry, not allowed to sleep on the streets. Streets are not for sleeping.”

Nearly half of the deficit reduction that Democrats claimed when President Obama signed the national health care law would be wiped away by the administration's recomendation against implementing a doomed long-term care program.

As Obamacare's critics noted at the time, Democrats' deficit reduction claims were based on a series of accounting gimmicks. One of the most obvious was the inclusion of the Community Living Assistance and Support Services Act, a program that was slated to collect five years of premiums before paying out any benefits. Though it was unsustainable over time, on paper it produced surpluses during the Congressional Budget Office's 10-year budget window.

At the time of final passage, the CBO found that the health care law would reduce deficits by $143 billion, and $70 billion of that was attributable to the CLASS program.

Earlier, I noted a new HHS report recomending against implementing the program. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now sent a letter to Congress conceding that there's no path forward.

UPDATE: The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff has more. To prevent any confusion, I should emphasize again that the $70 billion number I referred to was the estimate at the time of passage, when the timeframe was 2010 to 2019. The CBO's ten-year timeline has since moved forward, and over the next 10 years, as Kliff points out, the reduction in revenue from killing the program would be $86 billion. You'll probably see both sets of numbers floating around, so I wanted to be clear.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) challenged President Obama in a phone call over the president’s assertions that he has not yet seen the Republican jobs plan, the Speaker’s office said.

Obama called Boehner to congratulate him on Wednesday’s passage of three long-stalled trade agreements, but the Speaker quickly moved the discussion onto more contentious ground.

“I want to make sure you have all the facts,” Boehner told the president in the 10-minute call.

Boehner “respectfully challenged” Obama on the call, according to the Speaker’s office, reminding him that Republicans have outlined aspects of his jobs plan on which they would work with him. He also noted provisions in the president’s jobs plan, such as the trade deals, that the House has already approved.

Boehner’s office said the two also discussed transportation and infrastructure. “The Speaker expressed his desire to do something on the issue, but to do it in a fiscally-responsible way,” Boehner’s office said.

House Republican leaders unveiled a “Plan for America’s Job Creators” in May, centered on a combination of deregulation, tax cuts and the trade agreements that passed on Wednesday.

The Speaker’s office rarely provides details of conversations with Obama; its decision to do so on Thursday underscores the souring of their relationship since their negotiations on a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction collapsed over the summer.

The White House did not release a readout of the Obama-Boehner conversation.

With his own jobs plan dead in Congress, the president has repeatedly asked the GOP to present him with an alternative. He warned Thursday that he’s “not going to wait around” for Republicans to join him in trying to jumpstart job growth.

Obama said that, after he challenged reporters to discover the GOP’s plan for short-term job creation, he has yet to hear of one.

“What we haven’t seen is a similar willingness on their part to try to get something done,” Obama said.

Boehner has responded to Obama’s attacks by sharpening his critique of the president’s leadership, accusing him of “giving up on governing” to campaign for reelection.

Senate Republicans made their countermove Thursday, unveiling a jobs package and calling on Obama to enter into negotiations to reconcile it with parts of his jobs bill.

Senate Democrats rejected that proposal outright.

“This is a political fig leaf that would likely add to the deficit while doing nothing to create jobs,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

Asked how the bill, which includes a balanced-budget amendment, increases the deficit, Schumer’s office cited its repeal of healthcare reform. The Congressional Budget Office in January said repeal would add $145 billion to the deficit over 10 years. In contrast, a balanced-budget amendment could force some $9 trillion in spending cuts.

The White House has sought to portray the GOP as standing in the way of job creation, especially since the president’s jobs package was defeated in a procedural Senate vote on Tuesday.

The Senate GOP’s response package includes proposals that are anathema to Democrats, such as the complete repeal of Obama’s healthcare reform law and financial regulatory reforms, but it also has a number of proposals that enjoy bipartisan support.

“We have to be for something,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “I wish the president would have a jobs summit … This is an offer by the Republican Party.”

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who led the effort to craft the Jobs Through Growth Act, said that the package was developed in part because Obama has been touring the country claiming the GOP does not have its own jobs agenda.

“We are tired of him going around the country saying we don’t have a jobs plan,” Paul said of Obama. “We want to have a constructive conversation with him.”

“There has been no outreach by the president or his people to us,” McCain added.

Paul predicted that the Senate GOP’s bill, if enacted, would create 5 million new jobs.

The Republicans said that most of the package has been floating around for months, and McCain said almost the entire GOP caucus is onboard with the plan. He said he expected all to be co-sponsors soon.

Of the proposals in the bill, McCain said that “tax reform certainly is something that is bipartisan” and that he hopes the proposal to grant a tax holiday to allow corporations to repatriate overseas income could also make it through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

He said that he disagreed, however, with a proposal by Schumer to tie repatriation to a proposal for a national infrastructure bank.

The GOP jobs act also proposes a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a type of line-item veto, a complete moratorium on federal regulations, medical malpractice reform, a reform of the National Labor Relations Board and a series of measures to ease regulations on oil, gas and mining activities.

By LAUREN FOX
October 12, 2011 RSS Feed Print
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s minister ally Robert Jeffress might think Mitt Romney’s church is a cult, but a new documentary on the presidency and Mormonism suggests that Romney could snag the nation’s top job despite the religious feud between Christians.

Adam Christing, director of A Mormon President, about founding prophet Joseph Smith’s failed bid for the White House, suggests that while the issue lingers, voters appear ready to choose their economic security over their religious concerns.“The race certainly feels different than it did in 2004 when Romney dropped out of the race,” Christing says. “Luckily for Romney, I think many conservatives are going to be voting with their pocket books instead of their Bible.”

[Read: Romney Wins with Christie's No.]

And it helps to have the church playing along. Christing says The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made a few strategic moves to make Romney’s race more about his political issues than about his faith, including keeping their support for him under wraps. “I think the church is holding back from being too vocal about their support for Romney. After all, it seems like this is a time when Joseph Smith’s long-term dream of having a Mormon in the White House might really come true,” says Christing. “It is a smart move for the church not to endorse Romney. Of course, there are probably millions of Mormon dollars from individuals pouring in and saying ‘go Mitt go’, but the church’s support is quiet,” he adds.

[Read: Christie to Endorse Romney for President.]

That isn’t to say though that Romney’s faith doesn’t leave something to be desired among evangelical GOP voters.“I know many evangelical Christians who would rather sit it out in the next election than vote for a Mormon,” Christing says. “Some evangelical Christians feel like they would be going against their morals and values by voting for a Mormon.”

Christing says unfortunately for Romney there’s nothing he can do to convince staunch evangelicals otherwise.Instead he advises Romney not to run from the topic of religion completely, but instead discuss God in broad terms. “He needs to say, ‘My religion will guide me in terms of morality and principles,’ and leave it at that,” Christing says.

Friday, October 7, 2011

For years, the ritual response from the White House to the nation’s economic problems was to blame the Bush administration — President Barack Obama inherited this mess. With that excuse wearing thin after nearly three years of his administration and a persistently weak economic pulse, Obama has found a new reason for the country’s woes: Americans grew soft.

“This is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have the same competitive edge that we needed,” Obama told Orlando, Fla., TV station WESH this week. That’s, well, an interesting explanation for the housing collapse caused in large measure by government-promoted lax mortgage loan standards and low interest policies.

Obama’s comment was the latest manifestation of the administration’s proclivity to blame someone else — anyone else — for the failure of its policies to restore the economic vitality of the country.

Lately, Obama and other Democratic leaders have taken to complaining that Republicans are putting party ahead of country by opposing his economic legislation. In other words, the GOP is unpatriotic. That’s a dramatic turnaround for Democrats who angrily bristled whenever someone suggested a lack of patriotism in their criticism of the Bush administration policies.

We should never be surprised by hypocrisy in politics. Still, both parties would do the country and the cause of a more civil discourse a great favor if all insinuations of insufficient patriotism were banned from our politics.

Obama is trying to set the table for the 2012 election to portray himself as running against a do-nothing Congress. The problem is that half of Congress, the Senate, is controlled by his party. Obama has been on the campaign trail demanding that Congress vote on his latest stimulus package. So Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proposed a vote on the measure Tuesday, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wouldn’t allow it because he knew it didn’t have enough Democratic votes to pass.

The problem with Obama’s jobs bill spiel is that voters see it for what it is, politicking. Polls show a lack of faith in his stimulus measure to create jobs.

What’s more, he was disingenuous in arguing his case for the bill during his news conference Thursday. He said it has tax cuts and credits Republicans should like. The problem is that those are temporary measures, which have been shown to be inadequate in inspiring business confidence for the very reason that they are not permanent measures to give job creators and investors certainty about the future tax environment.

Combine a poorly conceived, politically motivated jobs bill with White House excuses, unprecedented spending, an avalanche of new regulations, wasteful commitment of tax dollars to green energy illusions like Solyndra, hostility to domestic fossil fuels and anti-business rhetoric, and it’s no wonder that investors and business executives are sitting on trillions in capital instead of making job-creating investments.

Things have gone so badly for the economy under this president that Obama admitted in an ABC News interview that Americans are not better off than they were four years ago. That, he said, has made him the “underdog” in the 2012 election. If that’s true, Obama has no one to blame but himself and his wrong-headed policies.

This morning, Mitt Romney used his foreign policy address at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to criticize what he called the Obama administration's "feckless policies of the last three years."

"I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world," Romney said, with an audience of cadets sitting behind him. "Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States."

Romney criticized the president on cutting the defense budget, as well. "I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts," he said. "I will begin reversing Obama-era cuts to national missile defense and prioritize the full deployment of a multilayered national ballistic missile defense system."

In his closing argument, Romney contrasted his vision of America's role in the world with that of Obama. "I will not surrender America’s role in the world," he said. "This is very simple. If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today." The cadets appluaded.

This is not the first time a Republican candidate for president has spoken at the Citadel, a public college that serves as one of the six senior military colleges in the United States. In September 1999, Texas governor George W. Bush gave an address, titled "A Period of Consequences," to cadets at the college. Bush did not mention President Bill Clinton nor Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic front-runner, in his speech.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

"America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good', but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes."

MSNBC's Chris Matthews used to get a thrill up his leg when he heard Barack Obama speak.

After Thursday's pathetic presidential press conference, the "Hardball" host compared Obama to a "lousy" new car that ended up being a "clunker," and then asked the Huffington Post's Jennifer Donahue, "Are you going to buy one next year?"

President Barack Obama on Thursday used his first news conference in more than two months to argue forcefully for his jobs bill, saying he is "comfortable" with a proposal by Senate Democrats to add a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires if that's what it takes to get his bill through Congress.

Obama challenged Republicans to explain why they oppose his American Jobs Act or propose an alternative that will put people back to work.

"I would want nothing more to see a Congress act so aggressively that I can't campaign against them as a do-nothing Congress," he said.

The Federal government's fiscal year started on October 1, 2011; they expect taxes of $2.6 Trillion and will spend $3.6 Trillion. The $973 Billion deficit equates to $3,243 per every American man, woman and child.

(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.

As Americans struggle to balance their checkbooks in the real world, lawmakers in Washington continue to apply postmodern accounting tricks to mask their out-of-control spending habits. New legislation introduced by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, and Olympia Snowe (R., Maine) would help to tamp down some of these shenanigans.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, has died, according to the company. He was 56.

The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.

Jobs had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as CEO in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."

Sarah Palin will not enter the 2012 Republican race. "I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States. As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision. When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order," the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee told radio host Mark Levin on Wednesday afternoon.

Families were more dependent on government programs than ever last year.

Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.

Click for full-size image
The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)

Means-tested programs, designed to help the needy, accounted for the largest share of recipients last year. Some 34.2% of Americans lived in a household that received benefits such as food stamps, subsidized housing, cash welfare or Medicaid (the federal-state health care program for the poor).

Another 14.5% lived in homes where someone was on Medicare (the health care program for the elderly). Nearly 16% lived in households receiving Social Security.

High unemployment and increased reliance on government programs has also shrunk the nations share of taxpayers. Some 46.4% of households will pay no federal income tax this year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Thats up from 39.9% in 2007, the year the recession began.

Most of those households will still be hit by payroll taxes. Just 18.1% of households pay neither payroll nor federal income taxes and they are predominantly the nations elderly and poorest families.

The tandem rise in government-benefits recipients and fall in taxpayers has been cause for alarm among some policymakers and presidential hopefuls.

Benefits programs have come under closer scrutiny as policymakers attempt to tame the federal governments budget deficit. President Barack Obama and members of Congress considered changes to Social Security and Medicare as part of a grand bargain (that ultimately fell apart) to raise the debt ceiling earlier this year. Cuts to such programs could emerge again from the so-called super committee, tasked with releasing a plan to rein in the deficit.

UPDATE: Nearly half of the population lives in a household that has at least one member who receives some kind of government benefit. An earlier headline incorrectly suggested that half of American households receive some government benefit. Due to differences in household size that isn’t the case.

I've spilt many pixels writing about the constitutional challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which are now nearly certain to end up in the just-commenced 201112 term of the Supreme Court. But there's another important health-care lawsuit on the high court's docket, one that pits the Obama administration against congressional and California Democrats. It's Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, a case that gets at the fundamental flaw in the humanitarian catastrophe known as Medicaid. That is: What should you do when you can't make two plus two equal seven?

Numerous studies show that many Medicaid patients have worse outcomes than those with no health insurance at all. This is in large part driven by the fact that Medicaid severely underpays physicians and hospitals for the cost of treating Medicaid patients. As a result, many doctors don't take appointments from Medicaid patients, leaving our nation's poorest without access to adequate medical care.

Even though Medicaid is bankrupting many states -- most notably New York and California -- most states are unwilling to pare down their Medicaid rolls to devote more resources to the truly needy. Those that are willing are stymied by bureaucrats in Washington. So governments take the path of least political resistance: underpaying the providers of health care.
On Feb. 16, 2008, in response to California's fiscal crisis, the state legislature passed a law cutting payments to the already-underpaid providers in the state's Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, by as much as 10 percent. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. California's providers sued the state.

Under the federal Medicaid law, states are obligated to "assure that payments [to providers] are consistent with efficiency, economy and quality of care and are sufficient to enlist enough providers so that care and services are available under the plan at least to the extent that such care and services are available to the general population in the geographic area."

In other words, states aren't allowed to underpay providers to such an extent that it compromises the quality of care, and the degree of access to care, that Medicaid beneficiaries receive.

Lower courts agreed with the providers, and enjoined the state from enacting the Medi-Cal cuts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower-court decision, agreeing in March 2010 that "the ten percent rate reduction threatens access to much-needed medical care." The Schwarzenegger administration appealed the decision, an appeal that has been carried on by current governor Jerry Brown (D.) and his director of health-care services, Toby Douglas.

Governor Brown may be one of the nation's most famous liberals, but he is subject to the same laws of arithmetic that Arnold Schwarzenegger was. When Governor Brown was sworn in on Jan. 4, 2011, he was staring at a 201012 budget deficit of $25.4 billion. Brown, too, needs to trim Medicaid spending; California is projected to spend $18.8 billion on Medi-Cal in 201112, not including the additional $25 billionplus contribution from the federal government. Brown, too, signed legislation cutting Medi-Cal payments by 10 percent.

Unusually, the Obama administration intervened in the case. Even though the federal government isn't a party to the lawsuit, the Department of Justice filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the State of California. And small wonder: Given that nearly half of Obamacare's expanded health coverage comes in the form of Medicaid, the administration needs to avoid the political damage that would come from bankrupting large Democratic states such as California, New York, and Illinois.

Suffice it to say that progressives were displeased. "I find it appalling that the solicitor general in a Democratic administration would assert in a Supreme Court brief...that poor recipients of Medicaid cannot challenge state violations of federal law," said Washington & Lee health-law professor Timothy Jost.